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Poultry Processing Facility

North Carolina, USA

The customer

A poultry processing facility in North Carolina making bone-in, deboned, whole and portioned poultry products.

Application

Peracitic Acid (PAA) is exceedingly used in the North American poultry processing industry as a safeguard against product contamination from listeria and other types of pathogens. After slaughtering, deboning and portioning, the raw poultry product is dumped into a dip-tank where it is briefly soaked in a 5% PAA solution before being conveyed out of the tank for further processing through a 75-degree swan-neck conveyor. It is important that the PAA solution is not conveyed out of the dip-tank and a certain amount of open area of the conveyor belt is necessary. The application necessitates frequent ‘start and stop’ of the swan-neck conveyor to balance line speeds and to ensure that the raw product is sufficiently exposed to the PAA solution.

Our belting solution

The customer was previously using a prohibitively expensive competitor belt which did not provide sufficient payback through extended belt life from such a high cost option. In addition, the competitor product did not have sufficient open area and hence, did not allow for adequate drainage of the PAA solution. An unfortunate side effect of using PAA is chemical degradation of many commonly used modular belting materials, such as POM.

Forbo proposed a conversion to our more open and much more economical Prolink Series 10-36 with scooped profiles in a material which provides excellent resistance against chemical attack. Not only does this particular belt style have a much more suitable amount of open area for drainage, the belt material has proven resilient against chemical attack.

Result

After more than 3 months of operation, the customer is very pleased with the results. The belt shows no signs of negative effects from exposure to the PAA solution and is performing without issues.

The belt continues to perform better than the previous, much more expensive competitor belt and is expected to give the customer significantly better value and payback on their investment. This customer will continue to utilize Prolink products in their facility.